Don't Let Me Drown
by Copycat
Summary: What Sam does at night.


TITLE: Don't Let Me Drown

AUTHOR: Copycat (Lizzy)

E-MAIL: Mild M for gratuitous swearing and references to sexual acts

CLASSIFICATION: Angst

SPOILERS: Through _All the Sinners, Saints_

SUMMARY: What Sam does at night.

DISCLAIMER: Uuh. No.

I had something very different planned, but I got lost in the land of plot-holes and improbability. Getting out of there with no map takes a while, so in the meantime I wrote something that doesn't have a plot to poke holes in. It really should just be a sketch for a real story or at best a very rough draft, but I'm at the point where I just hate thinking about it, and also there wasn't time to do anything more with it for now.

This story was written for Viv.

* * *

She picks up her glass and knocks it against the counter twice to indicate to the bartender that she wants a refill. He looks at her sceptically for a moment, clearly debating with himself whether or not to call her a cab instead.

She cocks her head to one side and quickly but deliberately touches the tip of her nose with her right index finger, her eyes narrowed as she dares him to refuse her. It is a familiar ritual that they go through at least twice a month, whenever he feels the need to prove who's in charge. At least that's what she suspects.

It's not as if she drinks _too much_. Some nights she will just have a beer, or maybe a vodka that she doesn't even finish, and some nights she doesn't drink anything at all, but just sits there by herself staring into space and trying not to think about anything until he tells her it's past midnight, and then she goes home.

He shakes his head in disapproval but pours another glass of vodka for her and takes the bills she has already thrown on the counter for him.

It's not like he really cares, she knows that. It's just a liability issue, and him not wanting her to cause a scene. He doesn't actually give a fuck how drunk she gets, as long as it doesn't interfere with his business.

"That was the last one," he warns as he walks by her with a stack of empty beer mugs.

She rolls her eyes at him but says nothing. There is no point arguing with him when she still has a half-full glass in front of her.

She feels someone walk up to her but ignores him, and he speaks to get her attention. "Don't you know there's nothing worse than a beautiful woman drinking alone?"

She stiffens. The words are so similar to something _he_ once said to her and for just the briefest moment she thinks it is really him. That he has finally come for her.

But he hasn't. Instead, a fortyish man sits down next to her and smiles as if he expects her to be all grateful that he's shown up to save her from another night of not having sex with beer-gutted, uncouth strangers. Because that's just what she wants, of course -- why else would she be sitting here all by herself? Also, he reminds her a of Jack a little bit, which makes her even angrier than she would have otherwise been. She tries to just ignore him, hoping that he will take the hint and leave by himself.

"Good thing I came by so you wouldn't have to, huh?"

She looks at him in disbelief. "Do you also think Heaven must be missing an angel?"

He frowns, clearly confused. "I don't really..." he trails off and looks frantically around for the bartender.

"Right." She hops off her barstool and moves three seats away.

The bartender catches her eye and winks at her, clearly amused by the display. He always seems to enjoy watching her snub the sorry bastards who seem to somehow think she _wants_ their company.

He probably recognizes her from _before_, when she used to come here with Martin sometimes, and he knows just as well as she does that she can do _so much better_ than any of these losers. That used to be obvious to everyone else as well, and most guys would leave her alone because they knew they'd never stand a chance with someone like her.

Lately, however, that seems to have changed. When she catches a glimpse at herself in the mirror she knows why. It's like her feelings are seeping out through her skin, making her look as miserable as she feels.

Broken.

She has been broken for almost as long as she can remember, but it never used to shine through in the way she looked, just in how she acted.

When she had first noticed the misery showing, in her sallowed cheeks and lackluster eyes, she tried to change her inside. She tried to care more about other people, and herself. She exercised every day and found a diet in some new-age magazine that would supposedly make her feel like a different person, which appealed to her on whatever level it was meant, and followed it meticulously. She went to bed early every night listening to "Sounds of the Ocean" or whatever the hell it was called.

It worked for a while, but then slowly the misery started seeping through again. Then she came here. At first, she told herself that it was a way of shaking herself out of it. Just suck it up and move on. But she has moved and moved and nothing has happened at all, so now she just sits here, sometimes drinking to stop thinking, sometimes not drinking to keep the thought from creeping in.

This doesn't work either, but by now she has given up on making it go away and settled for just ignoring it. As long as everyone else can do that, so can she.

She's good at pretending, after all. Pretending that everything's fine, that she doesn't care. That she doesn't love him, and she never did.

But he was probably the only one she ever fooled when it came to that.

Sometimes she tries to blame him for all of it. Leaving her, breaking her heart, ruining the closest thing she ever came to a shot at being happy.

And he did all of those things, but no matter how hard she tries, whenever she stops to think about it, she can't blame him.

With an insight into her own character born of forced therapy sessions that might have done their job at the time, but have now come back to bite her in the ass, she knows that she has done this to herself.

The only person keeping her from being happy is her.

But she also knows, with a different kind of insight that came to her when she thought he might die, that Martin is the person most likely to _help_ her be happy.

She pushes the nearly melted ice cubes around her glass with a dark red nail. She never really noticed the color before. She had gone in for a manicure earlier in the week, but hadn't really paid attention to anything after she sat down, just nodded whenever the girl polishing her nails had said anything. Clearly, that was a mistake.

She scratches at one of her nails, chipping off pieces of Luscious Red #79, and promises herself that she will remove it properly when she gets home.

It was strange to her when she realized that Martin could make her happy. Of course she told him once that he did, but that was really just a cover, to save her from telling him something else she didn't think was true at the time.

She has never seen any man as a means to being happy, but as a way to forget that she isn't. She's good at pretending, and sometimes she even likes it.

There's nothing unusual in her _wanting_ Martin, or any other man for that matter, but the realization that maybe she _needs_ him scares her more than anything she has ever experienced before. Especially because she knows she can't have him.

He has made it clear that he doesn't want _her_.

So for more than a year now she has been pretending that she doesn't want him either, and she is breaking under the strain of it.

She has watched Jack with Anne, and it has made her jealous, because he seems to have found something now, for the second time, that she won't even be allowed to experience once. She just hopes he appreciates it more this time around.

She does her best to ignore Danny and Elena dancing around each other, heading towards the inevitable. She wants to scream at Elena because it is so clear that she doesn't appreciate the way Danny looks at her, like she can tear his world apart and put it back together with just a smile. A smile she never gives him. It's the same way Martin used to look at her. And the way she used to never smile at him.

It makes her want to cry but she doesn't, because she tried that before and it didn't help at all.

Sometimes she thinks that nothing will help, and she will feel like this forever, but then she remembers that she is always fine eventually, no matter why she is hurting. There may be a few more scratches in the veneer when she comes out on the other side, but after a while she won't be able to tell those scratches apart from the ones that have been there for ages.

_Then_ she will be okay again.

It's just harder this time, because he is constantly there, reminding her of what she lost. In the past she always just ran away. "Out of sight, out of mind." That's what her mother used to say about her father, and she understands now why it always made her smile when she said it.

Having him _in_ sight is doing fuck all for her piece of mind.

They're friends now, sort of. They can talk and joke about things; lately they've even been able to joke about their relationship. And every time they do that, she dies a little more inside. But she goes along with it because she has to. If she didn't, she would risk losing the very fragile relationship they have built, or she would have to tell him _why_ she doesn't want to joke about it and _then_ lose his friendship, and that would be so much worse.

Right now, she'll take anything she can get, because living next to him is better than living without him. It just isn't very healthy.

It's a good thing that she doesn't dream at night. It's strange that she doesn't, because it seems so unlikely that she should be able to keep her subconscious in check when she has no control over anything else, but she is glad.

The things she sees in her mind when she is awake are more than enough.

They're nothing more than flashes, still images of how it used to be, being with him. They come at the most inopportune moments, sometimes, when she is interviewing a witness, or having a conversation with someone else about whatever case they're working on at the moment. They are gone in the blink of an eye, but it takes a few seconds for her to regain her hold on reality, and she knows that people must be able to tell, but no one has said anything, and so she pretends that no one notices.

She doesn't _really_ want the images to go away, after all, because they're all she has left, and although the memories hurt, they're the closest she gets to feeling good.

_Him, sitting next to her on her couch eating pizza, completely engrossed in the basketball game on tv._ She liked it when they just sat like that at night, without talking or really doing anything. It felt so normal, and she loved how she could just be, without the pressure of fitting into this box she had built for herself and couldn't seem to break free of around anyone else but him, and even then only on nights like that.

_His face above hers, looming, his eyes boring into hers as they're making love._ He would always watch her, searching her face for something she never knew what was, and he would beg her to watch him, too, but she never knew what she was supposed to be seeing. When she remembers, she always calls it 'making love', even if she never used to when she was with him.

She had wanted, sometimes, to ask him to make love to her, but she never said the words out loud. She never could. She used to tell herself it was because it was corny, and nobody really speaks like that, but she knows now that she was scared. Scared that he wouldn't.

If you ask someone to fuck you and they won't, it doesn't feel like such a rejection as if they say they won't make love to you.

She knows she has a fear of rejection. Of intimacy. That she has abandonment issues. But knowing all this doesn't change anything.

It's not like being scared of spiders and then going to the zoo to touch the spiders and overcoming your fears by facing them. Then again, it sort of is, except the spiders won't actually hurt you and she knows rejection will kill her.

The bartender clears his throat, and she looks up to see him leaning against the bar on the other side of it. He places a glass of water and a bowl of peanuts in front of her. "Eat something, will you?"

Her lips curl up. It isn't really a smile, but it's as close as she can get. "You're kidding, right?"

He pushes the bowl closer to her and walks away to serve another customer.

She picks up a handful of peanuts but then lets them drop from her fist one after the other until all that's left in her hand is salty dust. Wiping her hand on a napkin she looks around the bar. The Jack-lookalike from before is nowhere to be seen, and she wonders briefly if it's because he got lucky with someone else or he gave up.

It may very well be the first. This is the sort of place that men like him can go and pick up women who don't charge for their services. Martin hated the place, but he came with her because it was one of the few public places she would be seen with him. There's very little chance of running into anyone from work in a place like this, which made it feel safe.

The fact that it's two blocks from his apartment made it convenient.

And that's also why she keeps coming back.

Of course that's not something she openly admits to herself, but it's obvious even to her that the only appeal this place could possibly hold is its closeness to him. The remote possibility that he might walk in here one night and find her.

Logically, she knows that won't happen. He hated the place after all, and besides, he doesn't drink anymore, because of the whole thing with the addiction.

That makes being here safe. She's here because it's close to him, and she wants him to come, but she knows that he never will, so she isn't really setting herself up for a fall. But then why is it that she can never seem to land?

Her cellphone makes a chirring noise in her pocket and because she's already thinking about him, the first thing on her mind is that he's calling her, but then she realizes that it's just warning her that its battery is low.

She feels her shoulders sag but then reminds herself that there's no point being disappointed that something she wasn't expecting anyway hasn't happened. She toys with the idea of calling him, just to talk It isn't the first time that thought has occurred to her, but she never does it. Besides, when her battery is already low, the phone would just die on her.

There's always an excuse like that not to do it. Not to do anything.

When she gets the urge to call him, it's a signal that she should go home before she does something she will regret, and before she thinks of anything else that she already regrets. The urge to call him is inevitably followed by the urge to see him, and she can't be this close to where he lives when she feels like that.

Being here works until a point, but not beyond it. Once, she actually started walking towards his building. Before she got halfway there, a cab pulled up next to her and the driver asked her if she needed to go somewhere, so she got in, and ordered him towards her own home instead. He had looked at her in the rear-view mirror and nodded as if he understood, and somehow she thought he sort of did.

She never did it again.

Now, she hops off her stool and looks around her to make sure she has all her belongings. She does it slowly, carefully, to make sure the bartender sees. Just to point out to him that she isn't drunk and she could have had more to drink if she had wanted to.

He pretends not to notice and just waves goodnight.

The night air is cold, and she hugs her coat closer around her body as she looks around for a cab to take her home. Her eyes travel in the direction of his apartment, as if there is a force pulling her towards him, but then she shakes her head and turns to walk in the opposite direction.

End


End file.
